Leaf Earrings

Silver earrings carrying an applied leaf design show William Spratling drawing a natural motif across his work, the same leaf appearing on a large serving spoon, evidence of how a single decorative idea moved between his jewelry and his holloware. The applied-leaf treatment is the defining feature here.

The earrings belong to Spratling's First Design Period (1931 to 1946), the formative years of the Taxco revival. Spratling, the American who arrived in 1926 and became the central figure in reviving Taxco's silver industry, established the Taller de Las Delicias and trained the generation that built the Taxco school. Early jewelry like this comes from that founding workshop.

That a leaf motif recurs from earrings to a serving spoon is a small window onto how Spratling's design vocabulary cut across categories. For a collector, a pair of first-period leaf-design earrings is an accessible piece of his earliest output.